Mr. Plummer, whose ideal (never, alas! to be realised in this world) was a united staff, and who was also the last man to abandon any sinner as irreclaimable, made a final and unsuccessful effort to bring about a better understanding. He gave a bachelor dinner-party, to which he invited a few of his own friends and the erring Mr. Tipham: for Mr. Plummer had a touching belief that, if you can only bring mutually antagonistic people together over a glass of wine, they will learn to know and like each other. Mr. Plummer occupied comfortable rooms in an old Georgian house that fronted the High Street. Bit by bit, and with a rare tact that spared natural susceptibilities, he had weeded out the furniture and pictures of his landlady and replaced them with his own. His taste was eclectic and eminently characteristic of pedagogic culture, and the inevitable photographs of the Hermes of Olympia and the Acropolis found a place of honour amongst the equally inevitable Arundels. His rooms were considered the best rooms in Chiltern, and he was not infrequently consulted by his colleagues on questions of art. Mr. Tipham, for whose benefit Messrs. Bent, Rankin, Grady, and Chase had been brought together in the Georgian house, began the evening badly by arriving ten minutes late and in clothes which protested with unnecessary vehemence against the narrowness of convention. At Chiltern it was the custom, even at bachelor parties, for the guests to wear dress clothes; but Mr. Tipham scorned custom. A flannel shirt of that neutral tint which suggests either dirt or extreme age, a Norfolk jacket which might well have belonged to a tramp, and a pair of grey flannel trousers which the same tramp might conceivably have rejected, completed his festive attire, the only note of colour being provided by the bright orange tie which flamed beneath an unshaven chin. As Mr. Rankin said afterwards, he suggested a man who has snatched up some clothes hurriedly to run to the bathroom, rather than a guest at a dinner-party. But Mr. Tipham was quite unconscious of the sudden drop in the temperature which followed his entry. He shot a rapid and critical glance round the room, and, walking straight up to a small pastel drawing of a youth’s head that hung on one of the walls, he tapped the glass lightly with his forefinger and inquired: “Where did you get that?” “That?” replied Mr. Plummer; “oh, I picked that up at Chartres for a few francs; but I don’t know that I care very much for it.” “It’s the best thing in the room,” said Mr. Tipham quietly; “looks as if it might possibly be an early Creusot.”